Black Star Today

New York, 1935. The city is overflowing with immigrants from Europe. Among them are Kurt Safranski, Ernest Mayer and Kurt Kornfield. A few years before they were still successful professionals in the flourishing world of publishing and newspapers in the Weimar Republic. Safranski had been an editor...

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A reader recently wrote me, asking: “What is the possible editorial worth of my collection of offshore Atlantic ocean fishing; high school sports from the 1950’s – 1980’s; and aerials of the Pittsburgh, PA, skyline?”

My response: “In any marketing endeavor, the successful route to follow is to determine who needs your product.”

Another question you could ask yourself: What will happen to all your photos when you’re gone?

I remember reading a few years back about the largest-known living organism in the world. Located under the Oregon forest, it is a 2,200-year-old fungus whose fruits, otherwise known as mushrooms, peek out here and there. Probably because of their unappealing nature, fungi are poorly known, and it is estimated that millions of yet-unclassified species exist. What has been recently discovered is that they seem to operate as a network inside the forest, communicating information from tree to tree via the moist soil, somewhat informing and organizing the environment they feed upon.

No, we are not turning into botanists here, although it is also a fascinating subject. Rather, it is the first thought that sprung when I discovered Symbiostock, an underground, little-known network of related organisms thriving thanks to symbiosis.

From the moment a Brownie camera was put in my hands, I was hooked on photography. Fell in love immediately. What child would not want to see the world through an apparatus that an 8-year-old could operate? Even before the Brownie, I began circumscribing my world with a pencil. Looking at a blank sheet of paper was not daunting to my young self; it was liberating. I could create a universe of my own!

The thing about photography/art for many young people is that there is so much to capture, to draw, to photograph. It was thrilling to create images of my vision. And so I drew, painted, photographed, collaged, inked everything I could: landscape, architecture, people, flowers, still life. All of what I saw was fascinating to interpret as well as to transcribe.

If you are Jewish, and you live in Montreal, sooner or later, you will die, and end up at Paperman and Sons Funeral Parlor. Naturally, I had heard of it since I was a kid, but since nobody close to me had ever died, I never went there except to attend other families’ funerals. That means, I never knew what went on upstairs – I knew nothing of the business of death.

That changed in 2001, when my mother died at the age of 92. Suddenly I had to go to Paperman and Sons and “do business.”

We are on the footsteps of a new photography landscape that is or will be affecting everyone who intends to draw substantial revenue operating a camera. While we can see and feel the changes, how to adapt is not evident. Mostly because we are trying to apply or adapt old models to new rules and it just doesn’t fit.

Architectural photography is a wonderful occupation. When I am shooting for a client, such as a decorator, developer or architect, I usually have free reign to take my photographs with little interference. If there are intrusions, I can work around them or them around me. Recently, I photographed a restaurant for a client during lunch service. I tried to be out of the way of staff and customers, and everyone was very accommodating. The wait staff yielded to my efforts to get the best shots in a low light situation and the diners, while some looked curious, did not mind the lens clicking or my occasionally hanging over a booth. Smooth going for the most part. And the client was happy with the shots!

Not so long ago, search engine optimization (SEO) was concerned only with using the right keywords and getting links to your website from as many other websites as possible. Manage that, and your website was sure to rise to the top of the search engines.

Then along came the Web 2.0 and the rise of social media, and everything changed.

“Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” The Chinese philosopher Confucius was reported to have said. A lot people tell me that they can’t take pictures in their local environment. “Why?” I ask.

A couple of weeks ago, a developer asked me to take photos of some warehouses in Brooklyn. The buildings were on a street that had a lonely, barren industrial look. The structures were huge, boxy structures. No ornamentation. No interesting ironwork or mullioned windows. But the warehouses were brick, which always appeals to me.

It’s no secret that social media can be leveraged to monetize your reputation as a photography expert. But there is a dark side to this: a whole new generation of photography role models coming up who are unfit to be role models.

Take a look at the two photos below. Believe it or not, I shot both of these sunsets on the same day standing in essential the same place (on the shore of Long Island Sound) with the same camera (an Olympus UZ-810) and they were shot only about 10 minutes apart. Yet, the photos look very different from one another, and that’s due largely to three choices that I made for each shot: when I took the picture, the focal length that I chose and, very importantly, where I placed the horizon for each shot.

A few years ago, I saw a video about the late photographer, Garry Winogrand. The camera would follow him around on his day-to-day street shooting and he would offer comments to the camera as he worked. At one point, he turns to the camera and says, “Taking pictures is easy. All you have to do is decide what goes in the frame, and when you click the shutter.”

We are drawn into images by the sharpness of eye contact. Eye contact transcends the initial view of the image and allows us to establish that personal connection. Images that draw us in, keep our interest, and give us time to view the entire image are those where the eyes of the portrait subject look into our eyes.

The dictionary definition of influences is: “The power of things or individuals to exert force on another.” My influences in photography come in all shapes and sizes.

When I began my journey as an architectural photographer, I was a small child. My influences then were many and varied: Disney films, especially Fantasia; magazine photos and illustrations; museum art including paintings, and actual sights that I wanted to photograph all influenced the way I saw the world. Allowing a wide variety of images to chart directions for my lens gave me a broader base from which to grow and evolve as a photographer.

“You have to take the good with the bad, and I’m a songwriter so I stay sensitive. I have to live with my feelings on my sleeve so that means I can’t harden my heart and I get hurt a lot but I’ve learned to take all that.” – Dolly Parton, on Good Morning America

On Twitter today, home timelines currently show every single tweet made by those users whom we follow. We enjoy equally unfettered access to our followers—every single tweet we send appears chronologically in their streams. This may soon change, however, according to a recent announcement from Twitter.

Photographers have a problem when it comes to social media: The hard sell is dead. This is proven true by studies such as like Google’s Zero Moment of Truth, which shows that people now self-direct buying decisions online for everything from cartons of milk to cars and enterprise data storage. The result? More and more, we are listening to salespeople less and less.

Ah, marketing. That big black hole where we dump all our money and get nothing in return, right? That’s what it seems like sometimes. But, it doesn’t have to be like that! I’m convinced that in this world, there are lots of ways to market yourself that are not dropping thousands of dollars in a magazine ad or paying hundreds of dollars a month in Yellow Pages ads – and yet are more effective.

Instagram, the iPhone, even point-and-shoot cameras are coming loaded with them: filters to make your digital photos look like they were taken decades ago and stored in a shoebox until the internet came along. As professionals, we recognize digital simulations of color shift, scratches, chemical spots, light leaks, vignetting, lens flare, distorted lenses and edge print. But most people are just looking to invoke the nostalgic feel of decades past that, while not technically perfect, are no less steeped in loving memories of past happy times, family and friends. That cell phone snapshot that you just shot of some friends at a favorite restaurant? You can now make it look like it was shot with a Brownie 50 years ago.

After dreaming about it for years, I decided a few years ago to turn my photography passion into a profession. I soon learned the difference between sweet dreams and cold reality. Not that I’d do it any differently, but I’ve discovered many of the myths about what it’s like being a pro. Maybe you’ve discovered some of your own.

Selling print rights: it’s a quandary over which many professional photographers agonize. Should you offer them? Should you not? How much should you charge? Is it worth it?

It’s difficult for many photographers to sign over what they regard as their livelihood. Print sales are often how photographers make the bulk of their profits, so each professional must decide for himself or herself whether handing over a disc of edited images with full carte blanche is a wise business decision, but there are a few points to consider before shooting and burning.